That's OK, YOC. Don't thank me until I actually get off my duff and do something, instead of just saying I am going to do it. I have a tendency to plan to do more than I really get done, and recent events have made it even harder to accomplish much.
The past two months have been an ordeal for me. On April 13th, a fire broke out in my home's garage due to an electrical short. There was not much in flames, but there were great volumes of thick black smoke. My home consists of a two story duplex with a breezeway connected to the garage. I found the fire when I went out to see why there was smoke on the breezeway. We evacuated the house after calling 911. I lived on the first floor with my mother, while my sister, her teen-age daughter and three cats lived upstairs. The fire was put out by the local fire department, but the smoke traveled into the house. The door on the hallway to the first floor was still closed, so just minimal smoke got into the first floor. The smoke did flow up the stairway like a chimney and totally filled the second floor. The first thing we knew of this happening was while we were standing out in the street watching all this and we heard the firemen smashing out the upstairs windows to get the smoke out. The four of us survived, but my sister and niece were devastated because their three cats all perished. The fire totaled my sister's car, which was parked in the garage on the side where the fire was located. My car on the other side was smoked badly and got banged up from debris that fell from storage up in the rafters. The smoke also heavily damaged the breezeway, hall/stairs going to the second floor, and everything upstairs. Up there, almost nothing could be salvaged.
Since that night, our lives have been an adventure. We were in a small room in a hotel for 3 nights, then moved to a "suite hotel" where we had a slightly better layout. But we were still shoehorned into a cramped space. The restoration company that our insurance firm had contracted to repair/restore the house took my computer set-up and ran it through a cleaning regime to cleanse it from any trace of smoke, and they had it ready for me a week after the fire. But I didn't have a space to set it up. I went into computer withdrawal and bought a laptop. But I had little space to do anything. My niece suffered the worst as she was a high school freshman who lost so much and suddenly could no longer have much privacy or have her friends over to visit. We manage, but constantly we think of something, reach or look for it, then suddenly realize we don't have that with us anymore.
About a month ago, we finally were able to move into an apartment that will maintain us until the house is back to habitable. I have a desk with a little space now. and have set up my computer and scanner. I won't have real room to stretch out until we are back home, and there are still many thing that are out of reach for me. The slight amount of smoke in the first floor saved much of my comic books and strips, but there were some boxes in the garage that had some material that I was sad to see I had lost. Most of that was drenched by the water, and I really felt bad as I had to toss stuff into the dumpster. We are told the house will be cleaned, fixed and totally repainted and we could be back in by August 1st.
But I am alive and I lost just a small portion of my treasures. We thank God that our family is still intact. While getting over the loss of her cats, my sister has said, "It's just stuff." We can replace stuff, but not family.
